They each carried a shield, lance and dagger, and seemed eager to use them. Corbett suspected that they would have preferred to cut his throat. He did not understand their strange, rough language, though their leader, a smooth-shaven young man with eyes as hard as flint, understood French and carefully studied the letters and writs Corbett and his escort carried, before allowing them to pass into his strange, wildly beautiful country.

The north of England had been a new experience to Corbett who had served in Edward's armies in France and Wales, but Scotland was something different. Quieter, more lonely, beautiful yet menacing. He had observed it carefully as he travelled into Edinburgh. Vast forests of pine, dark and forbidding, where boar and wolf ruled; wide wastes of lonely, haunting moor, bogs, mountains and lakes covered the land. In England, the old Roman highways, sometimes much broken but their foundations still solid, spread out from London to form the main routes for travel. In Scotland, apart from the King's Highway, the Via Regis, there were few roads, only beaten tracks. Corbett had found it difficult to reach the royal burgh of Edinburgh and, when he did, bitterly wondered if it had been worth the effort. Perched on its craggy plateau, its grim fortress a mile separate from the abbey of Holy Rood, Edinburgh had been cold, dank and uninviting. Corbett and his escort had gone direct to the castle to present their credentials and were brusquely sent back to be housed in the cold, bleak, whitewashed cells of the abbey's guesthouse.

He had wasted two days before writing this letter and was reluctant to continue it for, after seven weeks of travel, he still had little news for his master. He had met the leader of King Edward's special embassy to the Scottish court, John Benstede, chaplain to Edward I, who had extended to Corbett the warmest of greetings.